If Elon Musk really wants to improve Twitter, then it’s time to shape up. He could start by unblocking me
The truth is, I don’t know why and I don’t know when. I have to assume it’s not anything to do with money; he, ater all, is the richest man in the world. I am not. I am scratching my brains to think of anything I’ve said ill of the man. As everyone knows, I am the same cheery soul on social media as I am in real life. (Okay, that might be pushing it.)
Yet, the short of it is that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and well-known tech wizard, would-be real-life superhero of our age, has blocked me on Twiter. It ain’t the greatest hardship. Someone else can tell me what the 50-year-old has to say, should I need to know. (In truth, and as my editor rather meanly but accurately pointed out, taking the time to block a humble reporter of my ilk would seem to be a job below Musk’s pay grade.) But nevertheless it all feels a litle bit odd given that Musk, who just paid $44bn for Twiter, vowed to establish it as safeguard for free speech.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twiter is the digital town square where maters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he announced when the sale was made public. “I also want to make Twiter beter than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
In the days since it was announced that the man who wants to help colonise Mars was buying Twiter, rumours have abounded that a tweak has already been given the site’s algorithm, permiting the tweets of some right-wingers — people such as conservative commentator Michelle Malkin — to show up in people’s feeds for the first time in a long time. Who knows if this is actually the case?
I am sure there will be all sort of changes that will take place in the near future, some more quickly than others. We know, for instance, that Musk wants to introduce an “edit” function to the site. But blocking journalists is not a good thing, not for anyone.
It’s not only journalists, either. Musk has blocked Public Citizen, a Washington Dc-based watchdog group that says it has been “standing up to corporate power and holding government accountable for 50 years”. The nonprofit tweeted on Wednesday that Musk’s blocking of it “would not going to stop us from breaking up Big Tech, fighting corporate power, and holding the rich accountable.” It used the news of its exclusion from Musk’s account as a fundraising opportunity, adding: “Chip in $1, $5, or more and help rein in Big Tech.”
As I said, I don’t know why Musk blocked me. I am not a tech writer, but I do occasionally cover what he is up to and the powerful hold he has over our society. On Monday evening, ater it was announced that the sale was going through, I retweeted a tweet of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in turn had retweeted a post pointing out China was the second-most important market for Tesla, and that since 2009 when Twiter was banned in China, the Chinese authorities had no leverage over the plaform. Was that set to change? “Interesting question,” wrote Bezos. “Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?”
My annotation to the Amazon founder’s words felt prety harmless: “World’s second-richest man weighs in on Twiter’s purchase by wealthiest”.
Did that innocuous comment somehow get read by Musk, who then pressed the block buton? Or does he have a social media team that does such work for him? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Twiter’s press office did not respond to The Independent’s questions as to why one of its reporters had been blocked by the company’s owner, and whether it set a rather poor example. Wealthy men (and sometimes wealthy women) have always owned the bulk of our media. Corporations, along with tycoons and businesspeople — people such as Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Bezos, who in 2013 bought the Washington Post — have for generations owned the companies that control our newspapers and television networks and websites. It is far from ideal, to say the very least. And their ownership of social media, something one might hope to be more freed-up and more democratic, also rankles. There’s something to be said for new models of ownership and collective control as being trialled by sites such as Mastodon — “the decentralised Twiter”, as one headline put it. In the meantime, we have what we have. And if Elon Musk really wants to improve Twiter, then it’s time to shape up. He could start by unblocking me.